Ran across Cory Doctorow’s insight that there are 4x as many WoW players as farmers in the U.S., and then noticed the Wikinomics’ gang’s take on his post as well. As the latter points out:
“…new collaborative media present different way of thinking about social interaction and collaboration. However, when you talk about ‘mass collaboration’ it doesn’t get any bigger or sophisticated than WoW. Players work together using complex dashboards to track in game stats along with messaging and voice communication to orchestrate their quests.
While it’s easy to write off video games as young and juvenile, perhaps the may be a little more important. As Doctorow points out “Next time President Bush tells you he’s going to Crawford to be with “real Americans,†remind him that there are more World of Warcraft players in the USA than there are farmers (though of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive).â€
Of course, Doctorow’s final reminder pre-supposes knowledge of what WoW is in the first place…and we’re not sure that’s a valid supposition in this case, but that’s a topic for a different blog / discussion!